At present, companies spend a huge chunk of revenue in marketing and sales. As AI transforms buyers, sellers, users, influencers, etc., what will marketing and sales become?
In my current project, RevInsight.com, we are trying to figure that out, and I'm posting this message here to get guidance and clues on which papers to read and implement.
We think the entire gamut, from strategy-setting to operations, will be transformed.
- Operations: agents to pick up signals like an overdue bill, a missed meeting, a delayed task, etc. and act on it using situation-specific "playbooks" to offload common tasks (using workflows with automated decision-nodes) or assist with human-in-the-loop tasks (using workflows with decision-guides)
- Scheduling: agents to figure out lead-generation (how much to allocate to which lead-gen channels to get what kinds of leads), opportunity-pursuit (how to create pursuit-teams and playbooks to maximize returns), territory-assignment (how to allocate people to accounts), account-grooming, usage-improvement, value-generation, etc.
- Strategy: agents to determine the targets/plans, budgets and headcounts required for various marketing and sales functions. For example, what is a the optimal revenue growth target for the next year given what we know about the market, staffing, product plan, etc.
- Cross-cutting agents-of-agents to solve for account acquisition, retention, growth, and customer loyalty; sales productivity and employee satisfaction; product alignment to customer needs, etc. And, of course, agents that drive continual improvement.
This is the second generation of decision intelligence systems. In the previous decade we built FrogData.com that provides decision support for US car dealers. FrogData is a plug-n-play data warehouse on which we run decision-intelligence algorithms to inform users about decisions and actions (i.e., AI-enabled operations). In this generation, RevInsight is minimizing the setup costs too (rapidly add data sources, analytics, and decision-algorithms), thus equipping our customers to be alert, agile, and adaptive. For this, we're making the system such that AIs can assist-with or take-over the setup tasks.
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Rahul Saxena
RevInsight.com
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